Russ & Daughters Cafe

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A Chip Off the Old Block

A Chip Off the Old Block

CreditBenjamin Petit for The New York Times

Because the kippered salmon, the slippery pink lengths of matjes herring and the shiny white sturgeon at the new Russ & Daughters Cafe are the same products you can take home from the old Russ & Daughters shop a few blocks away on East Houston Street, a cynic may say that the restaurant offers nothing more than an opportunity to eat the proprietors’ fish on their plates instead of yours.

To which I’d say: What’s wrong with that?

The cafe, which opened in May, is modeled on the store, to an almost obsessive degree. Backlit signs in black and white proclaim the presence of sardines, chubs, rugelach and pickles by the barrel. Below the signs are boxes of matzo and jars of chocolate-covered jelly rings. In the center of the restaurant sides of salmon and whole, golden-skinned whitefish with their slit bellies pointing up wait in a refrigerated case until they are sliced to order by a counter worker in a white jacket, just as on Houston Street.

But Niki Russ Federman and her cousin Josh Russ Tupper, the fourth-generation owners of the family business, have added to, elaborated on and deviated from the store in ways that make the cafe a three-dimensional restaurant, not just a theme-park homage designed to cash in on the original’s popularity.

Take, for example, the rye bread. Everybody talks about good Jewish rye but hardly anyone has tasted it. To get a rye that deserved to share the table with their smoked fish, the owners imported a baker from Massachusetts known for his artisan loaves, Gordon Weissman. His rye is dense and rugged, with a crisp, ragged crust, a sourdough depth and a generous strafing of seeds, not just caraway but also onion-scented nigella. Called shissel, the bread is as different from most ryes as bourbon is from light beer.

Or take the way that items the store is known for have been worked into the menu. Halvah is sold by the block, but shouldn’t be eaten that way. It should be eaten this way: broken into chewy bits and scattered over rich sesame ice cream along with salted caramel sauce and a spackling of sesame seeds.

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The bar features an old-time soda fountain.Credit
Benjamin Petit for The New York Times

Or take the new line of dishes from the Eastern European Jewish canon that are not sold at the store, like the baby knishes stuffed with potatoes and caramelized onions. Over the years the New York knish has become so dense it could be used as an anchor for a small boat. These little specimens are light and fluffy, and they taste not like flour and grease but like baked potatoes.

Or take the bar, situated by the front door on Orchard Street. How does a 100-year-old temple to sturgeon get into the cocktail trade? With a reimagined old-time soda fountain of the kind that would have blasted jets of seltzer into egg creams when Joel Russ, newly arrived from Galicia, in what is now Poland, was selling herring from the barrel on the Lower East Side. The white-jacketed bartender makes fresh cucumber soda, cherry shrubs, egg creams and excellent Bloody Marys.

He looks as if he belongs there, and the drinks, with Eastern European flavors like caraway, taste as if they belong, for the most part, although my egg cream was not as volcanically fizzy as it might have been. There is a small but well-considered wine list, too. The sparkling wines, especially the less expensive ones from outside Champagne, might have been made to go with smoked-fish platters like the Anne, which collects some of the store’s most luxurious treats on a briefcase-size board: its famous sable and Western nova smoked salmon, its underrated brook trout, its extraordinarily fine wild salmon roe and its “private stock” sturgeon. I asked our waiter what made it private stock.

“They get a lot of high rollers at the store, some very particular customers,” he said. “This one lady came in and asked for sturgeon, but when they started to slice it, she said: ‘No, no, no. I don’t want your regular sturgeon. I want your private stock.’ ”

This private stock of sturgeon did not, as of yet, exist, but the slicer obligingly found her an unusually sleek specimen. From then on, the fattiest fish would be kept under the counter for customers who would not settle for the regular sturgeon. (As with many stories about Russ & Daughters, the waiter’s account has the ring of folk legend. When I asked Jen Snow, who has the title of Yenta at the company, whether it was historically accurate, her response was long and began with “Oy vey.”) At the restaurant, private-stock sturgeon is advertised but is still a high-roller item; the Anne platter goes for $90.

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The Yum Kippered board.Credit
Benjamin Petit for The New York Times

The Anne feeds three or four people. And it does come with a basket of the excellent rye and other breads; a very good, crisp salad of thin-sliced potatoes with mustard; the house cream cheese, which sets the standard for the rest of the city; and all the usual fixings. Still, $90 is not bupkis, and it is not the only disconcerting price at Russ & Daughters Cafe.

Forget the caviar service, which starts at $105 for 50 grams of paddlefish and inclines swiftly from there. At the store, long admired for competitive prices on tins of fish eggs, the same 50 grams cost about half as much. The markups are an unpleasant surprise, and guarantee that for most value-minded diners, the caviar section of the menu will be strictly a curiosity.

At $60, the scrambled eggs with paddlefish caviar may seem like a more reasonable splurge. But when I had it, Mr. Weissman’s challah, although toasted, was going stale and the eggs didn’t have the voluptuousness achieved at, say, Jean-Georges. Some everyday items seem out of line, too, like $22 for four slices of sturgeon with butter, capers, tomatoes, onions and a serviceable bagel.

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For most people, fish on a bagel may not be enough reason to go to a restaurant at night. Russ & Daughters Cafe is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with the same paper place-mat menu day and night. You could certainly make a light supper from one of the egg dishes, especially the creamy and soft scramble with onions and lox. (How did the Lower East Side get along without this?) But that is a meal best enjoyed alone with a book. The kitchen offers very little that will provide enough traction for a group of friends engaging in a round of cocktails followed by a bottle of wine.

Unlike most New Yorkers, the menu looks best by daylight. Most helpings are modest, good for noshing. Salmon roe and crème fraîche with latkes, with hard-shell exteriors and fluffy white interiors, seem like breakfast. So does the sturdy bagel chip piled up with whitefish and salmon salads and flying-fish roe infused with wasabi. At lunch the excellent cold borscht could lead up to the herring sampler featuring rollmops, Swedish matjes and pickled herring, which has immediately joined the small list of dishes whose flavor helps define New York.

The cafe might have a stronger nocturnal allure with a separate dinner menu or beefed-up portions of plates like the latkes. And it might look into slicing Mr. Weissman’s breads closer to the dinner hour so they aren’t as fatigued. I’m not expecting to see any big changes right away, though. This is, after all, a business that took a century to give its customers a place to sit down.